Patricia Green Cellars Nefarious Pinot noir 08

Patricia Green Cellars

Tanzer 94 points!

Deep, bright ruby. Wild red and black fruit and potpourri aromas are lifted by smoky minerals and blood orange. Wonderfully sweet and sappy, with fully ripe red berry flavors, a seamless texture and strong back-end spiciness. Stays just this side of exotic, finishing with outstanding clarity and spiciness and a persistent floral note. Green told me that this was fermented with a lot of whole clusters. - Josh Raynolds

From the winery -

On February 14th, 2000 was a great but scary day. We weren't worried about whether the ring was going to get found in the glass of Champagne, whether we had it in us to propose or whether the one we were proposing to was going to shoot us down. Quite the contrary.

We were walking out the door of a place we felt like we had built up from nothing and were leaving some of our finest efforts in winemaking to date (the 1999 vintage) behind. We literally had no place to go.

The Oregon wine industry was a lot different back then. There was no Winemakers' Studio, there were no custom crush facilities, wineries did not share space and equipment. We thought we could have a successful winery on our own (although that wasn't truly the reason we left on that day but whatever) and fortunately for us a whole bunch of things fell into place and we ended up here in Ribbon Ridge on an existing vineyard with a small but efficient little winery building already in place.

That was 10 years ago to the day. Now, we are fortunate to have the 2008 vintage as a backdrop for creating a wine worthy of this break-up. We thought long and hard about what to call this wine. Something about it had to capture not only the wine but the magnitude of our emotion about it and this anniversary. Mostly of what we came up with were a ton of bad ideas and some unseemly puns. Patty sent me a text one day and it said, "How about Nefarious?" Boom. Perfect.

ne·far·i·ous: adj.; Infamous by way of being extremely wicked. The wine? Ourselves? Something else altogether?

This wine was incredibly fun to put together. There were 3.5 barrels from one fermenter of our Estate Vineyard that simply blew us away from Day 1. This fermenter was from a combination of two blocks: the Last Block which is a Pommard block planted in 1990 and the Confluence Block which is a north facing section of our Wadensvil Block that adjoins Beaux Freres and Whistling Ridge Vineyards. It is likely the best section of the 27 acre vineyard. This fermenter was done with about 65% whole clusters as opposed to de-stemming the grapes. The stems were beautifully ripe lending an incredible note of spice to the flavors and tannins to the structure.

These barrels always represented the absolute pinnacle of quality in our cellar. Over time we became particularly enchanted with two barrels from Block 5 of Ana Vineyard which was planted in 1978 and a barrel from the Block 1A section of Balcombe Vineyard which was planted in 1990. Happily these turned out not only to be great wines on their own but wines that blended together in a way that shows off the most-positive aspects of each barrel. The wine is 77% new barrels, 15% once-filled barrels and 8% 5 times filled barrel. The intensity is such though that even at this early juncture the wine hardly shows any oak tones and over time what is there will meld seamlessly into the background.

We won't bother getting into what the wine tastes like -- suffice it to say though that this wine, as many of our 2008s are, is resoundingly young and tight. While we believe it is still brilliant even at this stage the best of this wine is, perhaps a few years down the road. Cellaring will be greatly rewarded however for those of you that are less patient try a long decanting prior to drinking to give the wine a chance to breath.